Does Google Cloud Provide the Right Fit for your Enterprise?

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) may lag behind AWS and Azure in terms of worldwide revenue in the cloud market, but its unique pricing and technical infrastructure may be preferable for your enterprise’s cloud usage.

Before I get started on Google’s offering, it is important to mention that if you’re based in the United States you can try out Google Cloud for free before signing up. GCP’s free tier is available for 12 months and includes a $300 credit across all GCP services and APIs, as well as enough power to run a small app in Google Cloud. To find out more, read our blog: How Google is Stepping up to the Plate: Three Memorable Announcements from Google Next 2017.

Google offers flexible, customer-friendly pricing with no upfront costs and commitments, pay-as-you-go pricing, and no termination fees. Their Sustained Usage Discount (SUD) is designed so that it automatically gives you a discount on each monthly bill based on the percentage of time that instances in a certain family run during the month. If your cloud instances run for more than 25% of the month, you will receive a discount of 20% of the on-demand price. If you hit more than 50%, the discount will increase to 40%. Instances running more than 75% will get a discount of 60%, therefore the more you use SUDs, the higher your savings.

Google charges users per minute of cloud usage, as compared with AWS where your usage is rounded up to the nearest hour. This feature alone will spell out large discounts to many potential customers.

Less than a year ago, in August 2016, Google Cloud Platform announced their Preemptible VM instances, which like AWS’ Spot Instances, offer the user large savings – in Google’s case up to 80% off the cost of its regular on-demand instances. While offering an attractive price, Preemptible Instances are unpredictable due to the fact that they may be shut down by Google with a notice period of just 30 seconds, so are suited to large-scale workloads that are not time sensitive and can withstand interruptions.

Google also recently announced its Committed Use Discounts (CUD)- which is currently in beta version, and is reminiscent of AWS’ Reserved Instances where you can receive discounts of up to 57% by committing to a usage term of one or three years. CUDs require no upfront fees, rather you are billed monthly, whether you use the services or not.

Google claims that its pricing is cheaper than AWS and Azure; on average 60% lower for many compute workloads compared to its competitors, however this is not so clear cut. Whether or not you will save using GCP or one of its competitors will depend on your enterprise’s cloud performance and needs, and therefore investing in a cloud business management solution is recommended.

A cloud management platform designed for enterprises, gives you full visibility into your multi-cloud deployments and helps you optimize your cloud by making recommendations based on your cloud usage. These recommendations include right-sizing underutilized VMs where relevant, and replacing On-Demand instances (which are the highest priced VMs) with Reserved/ Prepaid instances for long-term projects, or preemptible instances where the workloads aren’t time sensitive or can withstand interruption. For more information on the different types of preemptible instances available from the different cloud vendors, read our eBook: How to Pick up Bargain VMs.

Cloudyn supports GCP, AWS and Microsoft Azure clouds as well as Docker containers, and can help you define and create your most optimized and cost-efficient blend of hybrid and multi-cloud deployments.